Using iframes

You may want to include Universalis content directly in your web pages
without making your users click on a link. This requires you to edit the
HTML code of your web page, but it's not desperately complicated.

What you should be seeing

You should see a Universalis page inside a box. It will have a scroll bar
on the right to let you scroll it up and down. If you are using an old version
of Internet Explorer then you may also see a scroll bar at the bottom as
well, which is a really irritating bug.

The page will start by showing the Office of Readings, but the links strung
out above the top of the box show how you can get it to display different
parts of Universalis.

Anyone who uses a really old or eccentric browser that doesn't support
iframes, will see a message asking him to click to visit the Universalis
site.

The HTML code that did this

You can use View > Page Source or View > Source in your browser to
see the HTML code for this page, but here is the relevant part:

You can read about the options on the iframe tag in any good
HTML reference.

src identifies the page to be loaded into the frame. If you
are making a site for a parish, remember to specify its local calendar:
see How to Link to Us for details.

name gives this frame a name. It is only needed if you plan
to use links on your page to change what the frame is displaying.

width="100%" tells the frame to take the whole of
the available space horizontally.

height="100%" defines the frame's height. You'll
have to refer to the documentation to see what "100%" actually
means in this context, because the details are complicated.

scrolling="auto" tells the browser to decide for
itself when scroll bars are needed: in practice, this means that they are
put in if the Universalis content is bigger than the frame.

frameborder="3" was used to make a black line round
the frame. You may well prefer to use frameborder="0".

<a>...</a>: The content inside the <iframe></iframe> tags is only displayed by browsers that can't understand iframes. We'd be
surprised if there were still some around, but including a meaningful link
here will do no harm.

Scroll bars in old versions of Internet Explorer

If you view this page in Internet Explorer 6 then you'll see that
the frame has a horizontal as well as a vertical scroll bar. This is a bug.
If you expect to get a number of visitors who are using this browser (which
is now long out of date) then the only way to avoid this annoyance
is to turn scrolling off and make the frame infinitely high: height=20000
scrolling="no".

Using links to change the contents of the frame

As we've shown in the example, you can put links in your page that the
user can click to change what is seen inside the frame. These are ordinary
links, but with the target attribute set to "universalis" - which was the name we gave to the iframe when we defined
it. For more detail, view the source code of this page in your browser.

Problems with https:// sites

If your web site is accessed through https:// rather than http:// then some web browsers will have trouble displaying the text inside the Universalis frame. This is because they consider your site to be a "secure site" (it may be a banking site, for all they know) and they consider the inclusion of "non-secure" material from another site to be hazardous.

Safari has no problem with this.

Firefox leaves the Universalis frame blank and displays a tiny shield to the left of the address bar: clicking on it allows the Universalis content to be displayed.

Internet Explorer pops up a warning message, and the user can choose to display the "insecure" content from Universalis.

(Later versions of these browsers may behave differently).

There is no easy cure for this. The best thing is not to use https on your own page that includes the Universalis frame. After all, you are not a bank. If for any reason you can't do this, then you can have a simple link to the Universalis site (through a banner, perhaps), or you can use JSONP to incorporate the Universalis text into your own page (this is only available for the readings at Mass).